|
Grex > Health > #89: Sindi Keesan's Lymphoma Journal Part 3 |  |
|
| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 475 responses total. |
rcurl
|
|
response 99 of 475:
| 
Jan 17 19:40 UTC 2004 |
He better use the upstairs plumbing if it is freezing, as pipes (and the
toilet tank or trap) could rupture. If one is concerned about water
freezing in pipes one should let them flow slowly.
|
klg
|
|
response 100 of 475:
|
Jan 17 23:18 UTC 2004 |
SK-
Got "accepted" to a CA patient/"survivor" support group. Starts next
week. Curious to see how it is.
|
keesan
|
|
response 101 of 475:
|
Jan 18 00:44 UTC 2004 |
Please report back on the survivor group. The local hospital here has a
second Tuesday evening Lymphoma support group but it is too far to walk and
too cold. The upstairs bathroom is above freezing, it is just that the inside
of the vent stack is closer to outside tempreature and the vapor starts to
freeze in there, one thin layer at a time. The downstairs bathroom is now
60 which should help.
|
gull
|
|
response 102 of 475:
|
Jan 18 17:23 UTC 2004 |
Chemotherapy kills off rapidly-dividing cells. This is why it makes
your hair fall out, for example. Taste bud cells also divide rapidly
because the lifespan of a tastebud is measured in weeks. My guess would
be that keesan's tastebuds are not regenerating and the ones for some
flavors are dying off more rapidly than others, skewing her sense of taste.
|
keesan
|
|
response 103 of 475:
|
Jan 19 00:23 UTC 2004 |
My guess is the same. Today I managed to eat my oatmeal so I think things
are starting to improve. In a week they will be nearly normal and then it
is downhill again one last time.
Today after Jim gave up trying to copying a Win98 drive using a DOS version
of llpro (which complained some path names were too long) we hiked downtown
(1.5 miles in 35 min) to the Life Sciences Concert at Michigan Theater. I
read the list of performers and Mary was not there any more, but there were
a few engineering studnets, one LSA, and some music majors or even professors
on double bass, contrabassoon, and timpani. I guess people tend not to
acquire these instruments as hobbies - not too much written for amateurs.
Jim tried to lure me there with the 'refreshments follow' by Hiller's. I knew
better. Hillers also donated food for the Life Sciences lecture series at
the Law School last hear and it was some really horribly sweet cookies and
soda. Same this year, plus ginger ale. I got some white grape juice before
it went into the mix - sour. Jim finished it for me, with sour strawberries
in it as decoration.
We finished off our big day on the town with Dinersty (they left out the salt
for us this time) after briefly (very briefly) checking out the replacement
for Hong Kong Inn, which used to be plain and simple and give you lots of food
cheap. The new place has fancy oak trim on the columns, menus in fancy
plastic folders, someone who tries to seat you, and abominable loud music.
It was cold out so we stopped at Dawn Treader. They have a lovely large $45
English to Slovene dictionary (I translate the other direction - that book
has been there a few years) and we found three linux books. One was for
dummies, the other was for dummies to teach themselves but not labelled that
way, and the other is 1995 Linux Doctor and it explained how to print from
the command line without lpd, using gs! sOutputFile=|lpr filename.ps.
Also how to set up Cyrillic, and how to use DOSEMU. 1800 plus pages.
$7.50. Luckily nobody else had snapped up this bargain. We suggested that
they add the PBell 1991 DOS 5.0 book to the free box, where Jim picked up a
book with Windows (31) C++ game samples. 1993. The clerk says all their
computer books as so old nobody buys them.
|
keesan
|
|
response 104 of 475:
|
Jan 19 00:26 UTC 2004 |
I have Realaudio working with a 33K modem, after wasting a day trying to make
a 56K winmodem work in a Gateway that thinks it has no Com2 in Windows. You
can even get 32K broadcasts. Three stations called for WMP71 so I wasted 2
hours downloading it only to discover it is hideous looking and you cannot
remove the skin or the 'visualization' (animated colored gif that occupies
half the screen). I uninstalled. There were some other strange formats used
for streaming MP3 - how does one listen to those?
The Win98 Media Player has no skin and the animated gif can be made to go away
by changing to compact. 71 compact makes the menu go away but retains all
the gifs. I use the menu.
What do we need to play a DVD movie besides a DVD drive and Realaudio DVD
player? We want to test out a drive.
|
charcat
|
|
response 105 of 475:
|
Jan 19 03:28 UTC 2004 |
Hi Sindi, have you tried playing a dvd in the player, I think most of them
come with a dvd playing program on them, I could be worng though.
|
keesan
|
|
response 106 of 475:
|
Jan 19 06:32 UTC 2004 |
It is not a DVD player, it is a DVD drive that came in a dead computer that
we need to find a way to test.
Today I was unable to get two winmodems to work with a variety of drivers.
Both said 'modem not responding' and 'cannot read port name from registray'.
Both automatically installed in com1. I had one of them working in the
Gateway computer and tried to make it work in the Compaq with the same driver.
The other won't work in either computer. How do I make it read a port name
from the registry? Which file is the registry?
|
mary
|
|
response 107 of 475:
|
Jan 19 11:03 UTC 2004 |
How was the LSO performance yesterday? I didn't audition for the
orchestra this year or last. It was a huge time commitment. But
I try to make their concerts and would have been there yesterday
had I not been playing in a benefit recital at the VA Hospital
at exactly the same 2:00 start.
|
willcome
|
|
response 108 of 475:
|
Jan 19 11:54 UTC 2004 |
Mary Remmers on M-Net?! What WILL they think of next!
|
scott
|
|
response 109 of 475:
|
Jan 19 13:36 UTC 2004 |
Re 106:
DVD software is somewhat controlled; DVDs are actually encrypted in the lame
hope that it would reduce piracy. You'll have to download (possibly buy) some
DVD software.
The Windows Registry is a database of sorts, from when Microsoft had decided
that the flat .ini files weren't good enough. You can tweak the registry by
running regedit (Start -> Run, type in "regedit" and hit enter).
|
gull
|
|
response 110 of 475:
|
Jan 19 14:13 UTC 2004 |
Be very careful what you do in there, though. Changes take effect
immediately, for the most part, and it's easy to break things. You may
want to save a copy of the registry first, with the Registry/Export
Registry File command.
|
keesan
|
|
response 111 of 475:
|
Jan 19 14:38 UTC 2004 |
Our neighbor who knows more about Windows says we should not need to edit the
registry and maybe he can stop by this evening to help. I wonder if we should
turn off 'plugnplay os' in CMOS as the Compaq was originally working that way.
And we may have turned it on in the Gateway. Nothing to lose but more time.
The concert was excellent.
I think I once looked at the registry and it was unintelligible to me. I am
unlikely to find modem settings in there unless I learn more first.
|
twenex
|
|
response 112 of 475:
|
Jan 19 14:40 UTC 2004 |
The Registry is unintelligible to most people. It's all part oBush and Gates'
Fifth Reich plan to control us all.
|
willcome
|
|
response 113 of 475:
|
Jan 19 19:00 UTC 2004 |
KEESAN AND GULL"RE HERE TOO?! WACKADOO!
M-Net's getting more users.
|
keesan
|
|
response 114 of 475:
|
Jan 19 20:48 UTC 2004 |
Can we lay DVDs using the DVD player that comes with RealOne? Or do we also
need some driver? Were they invented by 1999 (WinSE)?
I got the modem working by plowing through Windows Troubleshooter to the
bitter end, where they told you about a tool supplied by USR in the USR
drivers directory on CD that deleted modem driver info from the registry.
It happily deleted info for this non-USR modem (Conexant) and the next
installation worked. I had used a PCI driver the first time for this ISA
card. THe ISA driver worked. That will teach me to delete files that I
downloaded which did not work. I will try the same technique to delete an
actual USR driver from the registry and see if this gets rid of the error
messages when I try to install a PCTel modem in the other computer. I like
USR. They made my first modem, an external 1200, used, and even mailed me
two diodes to fix it when lightning struck. $150 for a used modem in 1985.
Peeling skin near one nail, starting to bleed. Nothing else exciting is
happening. Discovered Realaudio 8 won't load ('not enough memory' - we have
48M) but RealOne will load and run fine on a 200MHz computer tho it claims
to need 233MHz. I think I have blocked the annoying animated commerciasl (you
just won $1000 - pay us only $300) by blocking popup windows with Opera.
Jim is wondering now why he cannot run Visual C++ via the WCC website. He
has Borland C++ and gcc/g++ and DJGPP and two other DOS C compilers.
|
keesan
|
|
response 115 of 475:
|
Jan 20 04:12 UTC 2004 |
Our neighbor went through the last five '56K' winmodems. Three of them work
at 28K when you upgrade from 33K to 56K and he says those use the other 56K
standard that our ISP never adopted. One of them acts dead with three
different PCTel drivers. The last one is an LTmodem and, after we removed
all the other drivers (I used the USR regdel program) it installed itself
using Win98 drivers from the CAB files. Last time it did not work. You have
to remove the other modem drivers, reboot, shut down, then put in this modem.
So we used the modem to download DVD software none of which worked for the
DVD player. RealOne says we need the software that came with the drive.
Someone else got the hard drive that came with the drive and wanted us to get
the drive working for him without it.
Apart from the hot flashes, the laryngitis, and food tasting increasingly
worse, I am doing well. I could not stand to eat a tangerine today, horribly
sour. I can manage bread, and milk and eggs are okay. I will eat next week
instead. Except I still get hungry when I don't eat.
|
ryan
|
|
response 116 of 475:
|
Jan 20 13:51 UTC 2004 |
This response has been erased.
|
gull
|
|
response 117 of 475:
|
Jan 20 19:36 UTC 2004 |
The obsolete 56K standard that hardly anyone supports is called Kflex,
by the way. It came out because a few companies couldn't wait for the
official standard, and came up with something incompatible on their own.
The official standard that's widely supported is V.90.
|
keesan
|
|
response 118 of 475:
|
Jan 21 02:46 UTC 2004 |
So if the modems do not say v90 we should not try to make them run faster.
The PCTel is .v92. Maybe we are lucky it would not even install at all. It
came out of a dead Compaq. The Gateway had a Telepath 56K that would not work
- let's see what it says on it -x2 technology for Windows. 1997
That one worked fine with the 3com-usr 28K driver from the Win98 CD.
We have three Lucents also 1997, worked at 33K until we tried to use several
upgrades which made them 28K. The PCTel went with our neighbor to be studied
more closely. Its only advantage was that it was a pci linmodem and I have
a computer with only two ISA slots that I wanted to use for linux and one slot
has a HGC card in it. A pci modem would have freed up the other slot for a
Creative sound card. The pci sounds cards appear to be Windows only. So who
needs sound with linux.
We now have a 56K external modem which will solve the problem of the
shortage of ISA slots, that we got in exchange for the 200MHz Compaq computer.
We had a really big adventure today. Jim carried me in a car to WCC and I
visited his class. I corrected the punctuation in a program (The Smith's
house should be the Smith house or the Smiths' house). We had lunch in
Dynasty Buffet and I could eat the green beans and bok choy and broccoli and
two kinds of melon and suprisingly the pineapple, so we bought a pineap;ple
and some bananas and a few other things at Kroger's. Juice for next week when
my sense of taste should be somewhat better and I have to drink a lot. You
can now get orange juice with a choice of 2-3 of the following (but not all):
Vitamin C, Vitamin D, VitaminsE, B6, B12, calcium. Not with folic acid. They
are advertised as being good for your heart or your immune system or your kids
(who won't eat vegetables - vitamin E AND carotene). It might have been
cheaper to put all the vitamins in the same juice but maybe it would not sold
as well that way.
We delivered the computer we had made and set it up easily for the
printer and AOL. I tried Realaudio with IE 5 and Opera and it worked. AOL
said hello you have mail. We then tried to use Radio@AOL and it would not
load. The live online help said we need 128M RAM not 48M. You cannot put
more than 48M into that model COmpaq, we discovered (and if you could it would
cost more than the computer is worth by far). The live help sent instructions
on how to clear the cache - which is on the hard drive, not in the memory.
Of course it did not help. I then got Realaudio working while connected with
AOL. In theory AOL 5 does not do Radio. I bet it would let you use
Realaudio, and also load faster. But she is happy that it kept her address
book and she can still use it. It did not keep Yahoo Messenger. She was not
happy with 1024 resolution because the screen looked different from 800
resolution so we put it back and now the fonts are all very large and she has
to scroll. Too many new things at once - Win98 and AOL 7.
Jim then tried to put our non-Windows 28.8K internal modem into her
old computer which the store said would only work with an external modem.
Com2 had a strange address. If he changed it to the usual one the CMOS setup
program told him there was a hardware conflict. The modem would not work on
Com2 with Com2 disabled (Windows seems not to like that tho DOS requires it).
WEe had another IBM once that gave us teh same problem and we used up our only
external 28K modem on it. We did not have another one. So Jim tried Com3.
He tried Com1. He tried enabling and disabling ports. Our computer recipient
wanted to make supper (it was 7 pm) so we took the computer away.
We stopped to pick up a few things from the grexer (qborthwi) who gave
us the computer - 400 MB tape backup, a CD-Rewriter (is this different from
a plain CD writer and if so I suspect it is dead), a couple of read Creative
sound cards with manuals and floppy disks of drivers (!!!), another 28K
internal modem. On the Mac monitor I noticed a PC modem. He said it was no
good since there was no power supply. It was a 33K. 'Just in time'
Jim still wants to make the internal 28K modem work. To learn from it.
We have lots of USR modem power supplies.
We will be wary of 1997 56K or upgradeable modems from now on. Thanks.
|
keesan
|
|
response 119 of 475:
|
Jan 21 15:15 UTC 2004 |
Today Jim woke me after 6 hours sleep by getting up early to work on
defragmenting the Win95 computer that we replaced. Something in the 10 or
so programs whose icons are in the lower right of the screen keeps loading
itself into memory and starting defrag over again at 1%-0%. He ran in SAFE
mode and got half way through. The drive is 11% fragmenting. It looks
terrible when viewed with scandisk. This offends his sense of something or
other. One of the programs is checking memory usage. I cannot find a way
to remove it from automatically loading. The others look harmless - Yahoo
messenger, weatherbug, volume control. How do we remove these things?
She never uses them, just the start menu.
Before this I spent an hour getting the video to work again. Jim somehow
misunderstood when our neighbor said to change BIOS to NOT do plugnplay and
he changed it to do it. Then PnP conflicted with the video. Troubleshooter
said to remove the video driver which I did and Win95 put it right back in
the same place. So I removed three lines in System about PlugNPlay and
restarted. It put back PlugNPlay and then video and they no longer
conflicted. Sound is marked as not working but it works, same as in my
computer. We heard the Windows startup sound as we were reading about the
sound conflict. I removed a few icons that led to programs that were looking
for nonexistent dll files. There seem to be two installations of AOL 5.0 on
there of different sizes in aol and aol.001. This annoys Jim too. I
suggested we defrag and put in a modem and just give it back that way.
I am coughing again and sneezed once. My own fault for not remaining in
isolation for another three weeks. We have been among crowds at the library,
two restaurants, and a concert, and now at class. I cannot imagine what the
bone marrow transplant people are going through - a year of this, with much
worse resistance than I have. They survive, I will survive.
|
keesan
|
|
response 120 of 475:
|
Jan 22 13:57 UTC 2004 |
The computer video kept starting to conflict with PnP BIOS extension boards
every other time we loaded Windows but we finally got a standard modem working
(no idea how, it did not work the first few times - Jim thinks it helped to
load Windows with no modem in there, uninstall all modems, turn off, put in
modem, turn on and load Windows again) and at the moment the video seems to
be working again. Whenever I remove PnP BIOS and restart, it reloads a lot
of other things such as IDE controllers - one each time it restarts - and PCI
buses, and the joystick (five times now) which does not exist... 'I hate
Windows'. I hope we are done with Windows and then I can play with linux
sound and two CD burners. Is a Cd-rewritable drive different from CD-R?
Jim biked off to WCC at 6 am. It is 8 degrees at 8 am and a bit windy. I
hope he does not bring back any new viruses as I have been relatively healthy
all this cycle and want to make it through one more cycle without the flu.
I get to enjoy the next four days. Hands hardly numb, knees working,
laryngitis affects pitch but not so much the volume of my voice. Hot flashes
continue but only wake me every 1.5 hours for about 20 minutes. Food tastes
about as bad as it has for the past few months. Next week it might taste
better and then worse again for 2 weeks. It is too cold to go anywhere.
|
ea
|
|
response 121 of 475:
|
Jan 23 03:58 UTC 2004 |
Sindi - to stop something from automatically running in
Win95/98/Me/2000/xp
Open the start menu, select "run", and type msconfig in the run box.
This will bring up a program that you can use to turn stuff off at
startup.
|
keesan
|
|
response 122 of 475:
|
Jan 23 04:25 UTC 2004 |
Wow, thanks! I managed to get Realaudio out of Quick Launch on my own
computer today. I could not even find Quick Launch in the index of our Win955
book. I think we have conquered Windows for a while. We plugged in a bunch
of sound cards. One stopped the hard drive from running (some sort of
conflict)? One sort of installed in Win98 but was missing something.
Recycle. We kept the ones with drivers and the ones that passed the sound
through them without having drivers loaded so you can use them to play CDs
out the back of the computer through speakers. People seem to prefer that
to plugging in the front of the CD. Soundblaster passes through sound and
has drivers. Most of the other cards did one or the other - the older cards
pass through sound but are probably also 8 bit.
I just learned that Linux likes Soundblaster but not Creative Vibra16 - what
is the difference between them? They will work the same in DOS.
Jim is trying to learn to compile C++ for DOS in a class that teaches Visual
C++ for Windows. Can anyone help him? He tried to compile a 2K file and got
out 600K of something similar looking ending in .exe that would not run. It
was not a binary file.
My sense of taste is still not improved. My hair (what is left) has started
to come out again. But I feel much better apart from that. I also feel
hungry but I don't feel like eating more sour stuff. Ice cream might work
but it is cold.
A friend who is a nurse said to call and talk to her any time since she cannot
give me a hug. I am hard to understand on the phone. Good thing there is
email and snail mail. I owe letters to several people who tell me they really
don't like using email. Maybe I can answer Monday while my left hand is tied
up (unless they jab my right hand again - maybe I should let them since my
left hand has finally stopped hurting).
Jim went to bed. He biked off into the sunrise at 6 am to do homework before
class because the WCC net was down and he could not get his homework here.
He said it was rather windy (as well as being around zero degrees). I guess
there is less traffic earlier in the morning. The bike path along the river
is being kept clear, amazingly. Some people think it is a path to skate or
walk dogs on, but not in the winter. Or maybe dogs walk there in the winter.
I am told you can play DVD movies on a 33MHz computer (slowly). I wonder what
drivers we need to run it on our computer.
|
gull
|
|
response 123 of 475:
|
Jan 23 14:45 UTC 2004 |
If by "slowly" you mean "around one frame per second, with no sound",
that might be right. For acceptable quality, you'll either need a
hardware decoder card or a faster CPU. Anything from about 300 MHz on
up would probably do it. You'll also need a DVD playback program; it
takes more than just a driver.
|